As Denmark moves to deter refugees from crossing its borders, a new theater production dramatizing their plight seeks to change how many in the country perceive their new neighbors. Uropa: An Asylum-Seeker’s Ballet, [is] a dance piece performed in part by refugees portraying themselves.
It’s the summer of 1971 and tourists flock around one of Washington DC’s most famous hotspots – the Capitol steps. Journalist Art Goldberg recalls ‘a squad of soldiers moving through the space. They are grubby-looking troopers, clad in jungle fatigues. Jumping a low fence, they begin shouting at a group of tourists. “All right! Hold it! Hold it! Nobody move. Nobody move!” Their voices full of tension and anger. A man runs from the crowd.
In a twist on the Broken Windows Theory, street artists are using their skills to combat urban blight in Baltimore with "The Slumlord Project". By drawing the attention of neighbors to abandoned and vacant properties and giving pertinent ownership information to take action on, 17 artists are spray painting and wheat-pasting in a D.I.Y.
In 2012, visual artist Shilo Shiv Suleman started Fearless in response to the powerful protests that shook the country in response to the “Nirbhaya” tragedy in Delhi, India.
Beginning in the early 1970s, the Los Angeles-based multi-media arts collective Asco (from the Spanish word for nausea) created performances, street theater and conceptual art that satirized the emerging styles of Chicano art and pushed the boundaries of what it might encompass.
Beijing-based artist Liu Yi is working on a series of black-and-white portraits he knows will never be shown in a Chinese gallery. His varied subjects — men and women, young and old, smiling and pensive — have one thing in common: They are Tibetans who have set themselves on fire to protest repressive Chinese rule.
In March 1939, a 23-year-old Billie Holiday walked up to the mic at West 4th's Cafe Society in New York City to sing her final song of the night. Per her request, the waiters stopped serving and the room went completely black, save for a spotlight on her face.
Michelle Obama tweeted her own portrait holding a sign reading #BringBackOurGirls and soon countless celebrities echoed this meme online. Throughout a week, this trending hashtag had been turned into a social-media supernova. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign spurred by online sharing brought the outrage against Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping to the global stage.
In July and August 2013, O Teatrão, a Coimbra based theatre company, presented the project Arruinados, comprising three theatre performances in three abandoned spaces (‘ruins’), one in each of three cities in the Centre region of Portugal located along the Mondego River:Coimbra, Montemoro Velho, and Figueira da Foz.
For more than 20 years, Metronome, which includes a 62-foot-wide 15-digit electronic clock that faces Union Square in Manhattan, has been one of the city’s most prominent and baffling public art projects.
Rufina Bazlova is not afraid to surrender her art to activism. Born in Belarus, a former Soviet republic ruled by the authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko for 29 years now, Bazlova knows all too well that being apolitical is a privilege many Eastern Europeans cannot afford. 2020 was a pivotal year for Belarus, not only because of the COVID-19 pandemic but also the presidential elections, which declared Lukashenko president for the sixth time.
ZERO1 is thrilled to commission artist Chico MacMurtrie/Amorphic Robot Works(ARW) Border Crosser during the week leading up to SB50. Rising 40 feet from the ground and arching across an imaginary border before forming a bridge and touching down on the “other side,” Border Crosser is the first of a series of large-scale inflatable robotic sculptures that poetically explore the notion of borders by artist Chico MacMurtrie/ARW.
SAY NO TO AI
Artstation is a showcase of an artist's industry-relevant ability. AI generated imagery dilutes appreciation for the art that it mimics, and devalues the work of the artists it exploits. There are no regulations for the way that AI utilizes scraped data from the net and no recourse for artists who have uploaded their work freely for the enjoyment of others.
Close to 100 artists and activists staged a protest at the Brooklyn Museum yesterday afternoon in response to displacement — both in Brooklyn and Palestine.
As a result of the social stigma of homosexuality, lesbian feminists were rejected and silenced as a radical minority within the mainstream Movimiento Feminista (MF). Lesbianas Sin Duda (LSD) is a queer activist group based in Madrid that arose in the early 1990s as a response to this erasure.
#makeamericagreatagain is a group exhibition of diverse media that ran during February and coincided with the initial Democratic and Republican primaries. The exhibition’s title is culled verbatim from Donald Trump’s campaign slogan.
Out in Schools is a high school outreach initiative that has received acclaim from parents and educators across British Columbia since 2004. The Out in Schools program uses age-appropriate film and video presentations to engage youth and educators on issues related to homophobia and violence.
See below for a link to the performance of the song at the Academy Awards.
From Salon: How Common and John Legend’s performance of “Glory” fired up Oscar night’s idling empathy machine by Sonia Saraiya